Manitoba ship leaches contaminants into Red River

WINNIPEG – The derelict MS Lord Selkirk, left in a slough near Selkirk, Man., almost 25 years ago, is leaching a long list of contaminants into the water, new reports say.

Zinc, arsenic, copper, mercury, lead, chromium, manganese, cobalt, nickel, rubidium, strontium and barium were found in water samples taken in and around the ship, says a report by Eva Pip, a University of Winnipeg water quality scientist. Asbestos and mould are also present in the ship, its paint contains lead and PCBs are likely present in the ship’s electrical components, a report from Pinchin Environmental says. The reports were done for the City of Selkirk.

“It’s just spewing pollutants all over the place,” said Selkirk Mayor Larry Johannson. “We just want to see it gone.”

Selkirk city council is meeting with Selkirk-Interlake MP James Bezan about the MS Lord Selkirk Monday evening, before a city council meeting where councilors will vote on what to do about the ship.

The City of Selkirk has been trying to deal with the abandoned hulk since it was left to rust in a slough in Selkirk Park in 1990. The ship was bought in 2010 by an unnamed company that planned to salvage it for scrap metal, but nothing was done before it caught fire in 2012, further complicating plans to deal with it.

“Even just from an eyesore point of view, it should have been out decades ago,” Johannson said, explaining that trying to work with the American owner has been difficult.

A Selkirk city council committee has accepted recommendations to hire an outside contractor to develop a scope of work for hazardous material remediation of the ship and to meet with Bezan and Selkirk MLA Greg Dewar to request help.

“It’s out of our scope,” Johannson said, pointing out asbestos work remediation is expensive in any situation, never mind on a decrepit ship that’s still in water. “We need help with it.”

Jim Fenske, Selkirk’s interim CAO, also said the city of approximately 10,000 people doesn’t have the resources to deal with the hulk.

“We need to come up with a plan,” he said. “We want the federal government to be a partner and we want the province to be a partner.”

Pip’s report says Canadian Environmental Quality Guidelines for the Protection of Aquatic Life for zinc, arsenic and copper were exceeded in water samples taken from in and around the ship. Strontium was also identified as a concern in her report, although there are no guidelines for that element.

“Further deterioration and corrosion are expected to contribute increased amounts of contaminants,” the report says. “These contaminants cannot be degraded and their fate is limited to flushing and deposition downstream, sequestration in sediments or entrance into aquatic life.”

The report from Pinchin Environmental says the ship contains enough asbestos to require anyone who enters the ship to take precautions to avoid contamination.

The passenger ship was completed in 1969 and hosted Queen Elizabeth during her visit to Manitoba during the province’s centennial celebrations in 1970. It took passengers along the river from Winnipeg to Lake Winnipeg before it was abandoned in 1990.